Buyer Personas: What They Are and Why Your Business Needs Them

SevenAtoms Blog

SevenAtoms Blog

October 28, 2015 Rachel Riley

Creating content that humanizes your brand and helps your business better relate to your leads and customers is critical to success. But to know how to create the content that speaks to your target audience, first you to have to understand who they are and what makes them tick. This is where buyer personas come in.

What is a Buyer Persona?

Isn’t it easier to create a great product or piece of content when you know the needs, behaviors, and taste of the people you’re creating it for? That’s exactly how buyer personas help your business.

Buyer personas are generalized representations of your ideal customers that offer your business a comprehensive image of exactly who you are trying to target with your efforts. Buyer personas are beneficial to every part of your business, from product development to marketing and sales, because they help you create and position your products or content to better attract potential customers.

How Do I Create Buyer Personas?

Buyer personas are created by researching, surveying, and interviewing a mix of people relevant to your business, including customers, prospects, and target audience members outside of your contacts database. You’re looking to discover such information as:

Who they are, including job title, seniority, skills, and education level

What challenges they’re facing and what motivated them to choose your solution

Shopping preferences, including how they research a product or service, where they shop, and what influences their purchasing decision

Their goals for using your product or service

What they like and dislike about your product or service

Asking these questions will help you better understand the goals and motivations driving your customers’ and potential customers’ purchasing decisions so you can create the content that will guide them to choose your solution. From the data you compile through your surveys and interviews, you’ll discover trends and similarities that will help you create a comprehensive image of your target customer that you can use for future content and product creation and promotion efforts. We recommend using this HubSpot template to create your own thorough buyer personas.

Exactly How Can I Use My Buyer Personas?

Below, we’ve compiled a list of ways your business can use your buyer personas to increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Create blog posts, eBooks, whitepapers and other content with each specific buyer persona in mind.

Segment personas into lists for more personalized content marketing efforts.

Create “negative personas” to identify exactly who you don’t want to target.

Audit existing content to ensure its relevancy to your personas.

Identify the websites and social networks your personas are using most for future advertising efforts.

Cater your sales process to accommodate the way your personas make purchasing decisions.

Looking for more information on buyer personas? Make sure to check out our post to ensure that your business isn’t targeting the wrong one.